Good Morning Folks. Yesterday I took the day off and it was needed. I didn’t really get much of anything accomplished, but after yesterday’s emotional blog post… and tears that followed… I think I just needed a day to fall apart. I spent a good chunk of the day playing Destiny Rising. If you have ever loved Destiny at any point in its history, you owe it to yourself to check this game out. While I have spent money on my main account, I have created an alt account that is entirely free to play, and quite honestly… I have plenty of good stuff to make playing that account enjoyable. It has been interesting to see how fast I can progress it through the ranks and am already up to heroic content. Which means that I get to have the exciting grind of collecting all of the mythic weapons all over again. Over on my main account I am mostly spending my time learning Helhest, the new Arc champion and think I am going to add her to my more focused lineup since I already have Jolder to represent Void, and Estela to represent Fire.
The biggest news from yesterday is that we managed to get the Greysky Armada guild online in Destiny Rising. You’ve likely heard me complaining about the process of creating a guild… and it is in fact even more onerous than I expected. Firstly everyone has to be available during a 24 hour period to join the guild, and has to leave their existing packs before they can even be invited. I am not sure if extended friendships are not important to the Chinese player base… but every single one of these mobile games has an awful guild system. In AFK Journey you get thrown on random servers and can ONLY ever invite people from that random server. We cheated in getting this guild off the ground when Ace and I realized that we could easily create alt accounts. With our alts and a handful of people actively playing , we managed to get the guild up and running and actually leveled it up the first time and upgraded the hangar to level 2. If you are playing this game and a reader of this blog, feel free to join the guild.
I am pretty pleased with our progress for a single day of doing pack hunt. Granted this was swapping between two accounts and running missions to uncover more ground. Essentially I was trying to find one of the strongholds, because I have never actually managed to do one of those and thought maybe with a guild of people I actually know I might be able to arrange a time when we could have three people on at the same time. The mountain ranges are somewhat infuriating because you have a bunch of highlighted areas around the map, and inevitably you will run into a wall that is not passable that will cause you to waste a bunch of turns. Sadly the community has not figured out the pattern to these maps so it isn’t like the Labyrinth in Path of Exile where you can see where you are going each week. You sort of have to just poke around in the darkness trying to find resources.
In other news, I managed to get the currency needed to push Estela up to gold and clear the logjam that was halding my ascendancy points. So I went immediately from 24 to 30, and have since pushed it up to 31. Right now I am working on getting Helhest up to gold, but have quite a bit of work left to go on her. I knocked out Silver on her last night, and am working on farming a set of exotic artifacts so that I can properly equip her. I am not sure if I can just do the equip highest and get her past the hurdle or not. I essentially need another round of the rare materials in order to push her up to gold anyways, so I am likely going to be in a holding pattern for a bit. I might start working on some of the other characters and knocking out bronze and silver so that I can get more points and raise my ascendancy level up a bit while I am waiting.
I’ve continued pulling on the Helhest banner since I like the character so much, hoping to get more copies and ultimately more talent tree points. This has led to an abomination… and I now have a 6 star version of Finnala. Like there is nothing inherently wrong with Finnala, she just does not have that great of a kit. She is ultimately a less useful version of Wolf, and the big problem I have with her is that she has no range abilities. This means that you are essentially left in the dust while running content on her because Destiny Rising is like every other game where you do the same content over and over… and it is go go go go go. She is perfectly cromulent for doing content planet side, and that is honestly have I have ranked up most of her reputation doing dailies, because she is really good when it requires fire stuff.
Speaking of abominations… we finally got our Trikora match and it was just as hilarious as we expected it to be. We honestly did better than I expected, but due to seemingly no one queuing for shifting sands, we ended up in there with two human teams, and everything else bots. We did fairly well and I think we placed second overall, but it was a massive difference between playing against human players and bots. The bots were way more aggressive… and actively tried to hunt us down constantly… but were also sort of dumb. The one time we ran into a human team unprepared we were quickly wiped. However we wrecked the bots in pretty much every encounter. This is a bad ideas match up…. but was super funny to play through.
Mostly right now I am going to be playing a lot of Helhest so that I can unlock the last bits of her storyline. So far I really like it and she is one of the more interesting characters in the game. I legitimately like her both in her skill set and the story that is being told. I think this was also part of the reason why I bonded with Estela so hard, is because the story that was being told was actually really good. Helhest would be better if you did not have to keep resummoning the drones… but then again they probably learned their lesson with Estela. The little manta ray things that she summons are constantly running ahead of the players and clearing objectives before anyone has a chance to get to them. Helhest though is a beast when it comes to a burn phase because pending she has all three drones up… you can just wreck a boss big time. This is absolutely my sniper of choice going forward, and I have contemplated burning down Umeko just to get the resources back to spend them on Helhest.
Anyways. Destiny Rising is fucking great. You should check it out, and when you do… join our guild. Legitimately though, if you ever enjoyed Destiny at some point in the past, you are going to love this game. I personally find it way more enjoyable than Destiny ever was. I just hope we get some more world content soon at the end of this season.